GAME REVIEW: The Wild Eight (Early Access) (PC)

Survival is very hard. If I was to ever be involved in a situation where I was stranded, I don’t have a lot of faith in my survival. The Wild Eight gives me even less hope. Developed by Fntastic, a freshman company out of Russia, The Wild Eight is a survival game that pits you against nature. You choose from eight characters, each with different specialties to keep you alive. You awake at the crash site of a plane, in Alaska during winter.

You are introduced to ways you can survive. You gather wood from trees and ore from stones, and build structures that allow for even more building options. You can build a shelter to spend the night in, or a workshop to create tools to help you live longer. There are three meters you need to keep a check on: life, warmth, and hunger. Within a few minutes exposed to the elements, you will see your warmth gauge go down. Hunger will decrease as well, so you will have to discover something edible in the wild. If you stay in your shelter, then you get a pause on your declining status. When you awake, it’s back out into the forest for you. I hope that your survival time is tweaked in future updates, because it’s rough as it stands.

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When hunger hits your character, you can go the vegetarian or carnivore route, with the vegetarian option being the easier one. There are mushrooms and berries to find, and you have certain food items that you have from the crash site. If you want to hunt animals, there are a variety of them, with different responses to your attack. Some run away, while others will attack back. There is one type of meat you don’t have to hunt for: human flesh. This flesh appears after you have died. Yes, you essentially can eat yourself. What a concept!

As you progress through objectives, you are able to save at any time, and there seems to be only one save per character. With the survival aspect of The Wild Eight, you’re taking a risk with your game. You could save your game, come back, and end up dying within minutes. If you want to fare better, you will want to try multiplayer. I’ve only ever teamed up with one other person, but multiplayer allows for more people to work cooperatively. You can share resources, leave notes for one another, and complete objectives separately.

There is a good game lying within The Wild Eight, and it is well on its way to being in a totally playable state, but for £14.99 ($19.99) I think that’s a bit much to ask for when your game still has kinks to work out; during my run, I encountered animals behaving oddly docile, and they didn’t drop anything upon death. There were also times that I was not able to pick up dropped items. If you would like to take a chance on this new survival game, The Wild Eight is available for play on Windows only. The game continues to be patched and improved upon as you read this.